Genetic, epigenetic, and environmental factors influencing dog lifespan: a systematic review

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Importance: Understanding animal life histories is important for delivering timely and appropriate veterinary care and ensuring high quality of life standards throughout different life stages of an individual.
Objective: To determine the factors affecting companion dog lifespan and the certainty with which those factors are known.
Evidence Review: Factors influencing dog lifespan were searched for in three large databases according to Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines. The resulting papers were reviewed according to Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation criteria for epidemiological evidence.
Findings: Adult size of dog is inversely correlated with lifespan. Neutering dogs has a larger beneficial effect on lifespan in female dogs than male dogs, but the reasons for this discrepancy between sexes are still unclear. Diet restriction increases lifespan, and overweight dogs have shorter lifespans than those of their normal body condition counterparts.
Conclusions and Relevance: Among well-studied and proven factors, like body size, mechanism research is still necessary to understand the underlying reasons for these correlations. While neutering is one of the most well-studied modifiable factors on longevity, more research should be added to the field of work. Other modifiable factors such as household and outdoor environmental exposures and dietary exposures require much more research before any definitive conclusions can be drawn about their effect on longevity in pet dogs. Researchers and practitioners can use this information in their daily work.